Microsoft lists seven habits of highly effective Windows 11 users Microsoft has published seven tips for getting the most out of Windows 11, and the pitches for the operating system – which has failed to win hearts and minds of users – are not very compelling. The first is "Make the Start Menu your own," and it is strong advice considering the Start Menu is one of the most complained-about …
Habit 12: Insert two pencils in your nose as well as wearing aforesaid pants on your head.
"Make the Start Menu your own," - I've tried, but i ended up using good ol' taskbar icons and search (recently i've been using powertoys launch instead, way better than search with it's horrific indexing!)
"Tip two is using Snap layouts for multitasking or, more likely, wondering why that window has decided to align itself there without prompting. Perhaps an alternative, such as FancyZones in PowerToys, might be a better bet?" - nothing to add here. i drag to the side for side-by-side windows all the time and if i do this slightly too far away from the center it goes to a quad-window setup...
a desktop for every project - solid advice honestly. I don't use it enough to really know how well it works in win11, alt-tab-fu is stuck in my muscle memory.
staying up to date with widgets - "staying up to date with widget removal methods" - FTFY
Focus sessions - you mean, silence all notifications so i miss everything? how about giving us proper and easy to use control over what notifications we receive instead? Simply having apps request permissions instead of allowing notifications by default would be a godsent...
logging in with Windows Hello - yes, because you've made it a PITA to not use windows hello (although i do like it)
Dark Mode That's just personal preference... i use it but i don't see how it's "making the most of windows 11". It's basically on-par with "change your background and color theme!".
I have read this a few times, that people use the search to open programs in Windows. Is this prevalent ?
I use Linux with KDE desktop, and even though it is easy to locate the program, you can add it to the Favourites, or add it to Task Manager. Everything is GUI based, no searching required.
If you have to search by typing on the keyboard for a program, in a GUI based system (Windows 11), then surely that GUI has failed the basic reason for having the GUI in the first place.
Hey now, "no results" is not entirely accurate.
You forgot to mention the dozens of web search results and "shop for chr and SAVE with Bing" results.
Lest anyone think Microsoft has a monopoly on this sort of thing... I am currently battling the Files application on Apple iOS, which is utterly incapable of finding anything even when right under its metaphorical nose. Browse to an SMB shared folder full of documents, see the listing, see that the first file is called README.DOC, type "README" into the search box (or even README.DOC!) and... no results.
Ain't that the truth. Here's what I see for 'best match':
d - File Explorer
do - File Explorer
doc ... document - Documentation (an application apparently).
documents - Documents folder.
On the other hand:
c - Chrome Browser
Which would be useful except that I have it pinned to the taskbar so don't need to search for it.
On my machine it seems to prioritise finding applications before than folders. Although none of that explains why 'do' matches 'File Explorer' nor why 'q' returns Task Manager as the best match.
As Lee D said, I want my "existing nice, ordered alphabetical, sub-categorised start menu and not try to either split everything between Apps and Programs (meaning "Microsoft Junk" and "Everything else")"
I've had Commentards tell me here that I should be using search like they do, when I've stated my objection to the clusterfuck that Win 10 Start becomes if you don't know how to take control of it, and that 11 removes much of that control. When I've pointed out that Search is pretty much shit when programmes' publishers give them stupid unhelpful names, if it's a programme you use infrequently (Balbolka, Greenfish,TDmore etc.) I've had comments denying that this is likely. that I may only use something once or twice a year as if this is unreasonable.
So yes.
> people use the search to open programs in Windows. Is this prevalent ?
I saw that on Apple/Mac over a decade ago. At the time, Mac app file locations were even more baffling than in DOS/Win9x and it maybe made sense.
FWIW, in Win7 the "Search programs and files" thing in the Start button Just Works. Even obscure graphics and browsers come to the top of a short list.
The Win10/11 "Search" is designed to be easy to hate. If it even had a choice of Local First or Web First it would be less hateful.
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I've seen that bug multiple times on Windows 10, wherein the Start Menu just won't pop up whether clicking on the Start button or pressing Ctrl+Esc or pressing the Windows key.
To be fair, I haven't seen it yet on Windows 11; perhaps Microsoft has finally conquered one of the most complicated and difficult problems in the field of IT, namely "making a menu appear when the user asks for it"...? Next up, P=NP?
Here we go again: MS advising users to change their way of working to accommodate a new UI. Perhaps the best tip would be for Redmond to stabilise on ONE look and feel for their desktop rather that mess about with it on each major release. That way, users would develop muscle memory and spend more time working with applications - you know, the things they actually want to interact with.
I know, I'm a radical.
And replace the Start Menu.
And replace the Taskbar
And block all the adverts for Onedrive / O365
And block the Microsoft store
And set up a local account and bin the "Microsoft" account
And stop Teams auto-launching at boot.
But yeah, once you've done about 30 different things to modify and tweak the living shit out of it, it becomes acceptable. A glowing endoresement I think you'll agree!
Maybe someone will publish a cross-grade to switch our working systems from W10 to Ubuntu LTS or something less bloated? (In case you ask, I needed Windows for full 'silverlight' to work from home, but for most people it's just too much trouble to get a Linux laptop since Dell stopped providing it on the low level ones.)
Thanks, I open my news sources websites and read them there. And I choose what to read and what not, not a stupid algoritm trained on "Idiocracy" citizens mostly showing useless and gossipy news as click baits, Nor I'm obsessed about the weather - unless an hurricane is about to strike, but then I'll see it in the news...
The Start Menu doesn't need to be like a phone home screen. Windows 11 is even able to make Windows 8 look good, at least tiles could show some useful informations, although showing it full screen was an idiocy.
Well, with Redmond's stupid decision to limit Windows 11 to the latest hardware, I'm guessing Windows 1 0 (previously known as The Last Windows) will be sticking around longer than XP.
Borkzilla.
How demented do you have to be to torpedo your own "next" version ?
I've said it before : there is nothing in windows 11 that couldn't be just updated in 1 0, and there is certainly nothing that justifies replacing hardware. In the 90s, I was replacing my motherboard, CPU and graphics card every year, because it was worth it.
In 2015 I upgraded my home PC to an Intel Core-i7 6700.
I kept that computer config until 2021, when I decided to finally upgrade for Core i9-10980XE.
If I count correctly, that's 6 years with the same config. And I'm a gamer. I need the best FPS I can get.
For most people, I'm betting that their PC/laptop that they bought ten years ago is still just fine for Youtube and reading their email. Maybe writing a letter or two per year.
Borkzilla : your days of forcing upgrades are over.
Deal with it.
"Borkzilla : your days of forcing upgrades are over."
Not in the enterprise world, where machine refresh cycles mean most companies and organisations are now in a position to squeeze out W11 on to the desktops. Appreciate what you say that there's many machines that don't meet W11's artificial requirements, but that will be those businesses who are running pretty antiquated (and maybe capable) IT, rather than having that refresh approach. I've worked for a big company that scrimped on IT and didn't run a PC refresh strategy, just buying on need, and recycling an ever growing mix-and-match fleet. That was a pain for users, especially if next time your PC broke you got a replacement piece of junk with insufficient RAM and spinning rust storage. Current employer runs a standard build across around 10k laptops, with periodic replacement cycles to new machines. That's sooo much better, other than the marginal downside of getting W11.
My 3-year-old work laptop is "end of lease" so I was asked to order a new one. When it (eventually) comes in, I'll start the process of getting it to work as well as the Win10 one, including all the programs I actually have to have for work. So, maybe, in about 6-9 months, it'll be usable.
(Note: I wish I could just run Ubuntu, for a truly usable and customizable machine, but no, the site's addicted to Teams...)
Similar here, also a gamer.
From the mid 90s I was upgrading (new Motherboard, CPU and RAM etc) every 2-3 years.
In 2013 I built a Intel i7 3770K system and used that till 2019, so 6 years.
In 2019 I switched to AMD with an AM4 3800X system.
That system is still my primary gaming system today, so 6 years later. Although I did drop in a 5800X3D in a couple of years back, and more recently a new 9070XT.
The GFX card, which is a good card, the fastest available from AMD currently [*], is still the bottleneck in almost every game (if I don't set an FPS limit), so I see no reason to upgrade the CPU any time soon, as that wouldn't benefit me much (this would also require a new MB and RAM as a minimum, so not too cheap either!).
I can't imagine me doing another CPU upgrade for at least another 2 to 3 years, and even then it's going to be a case of demonstrating that the CPU is now a real bottleneck.
I also ditched Windows as my main OS over two years back, so game on Linux these days (thank you Valve and their Proton in native Steam!)
* The only GFX cards faster than the 9070XT are top end NVIDIA cards, and they are all way way way overpriced! (and not as Linux friendly).
I cannot adequately express how much I do not want widgets of any kind, especially weather.
I can't tell you how little I want my desktop doing, either when it's visible (which is just a waste of screen space compared to there being a program launcher like Program Manager) or not (because I'm actually DOING STUFF and am only interested in the stuff I'm doing, not what junk Microsoft has thrown on the third-reinvention of Active Desktop that sucks up networking, CPU, GPU, RAM, gives away data I don't want it to have, etc.
I would like my OS GUI shell to do:
- As little as possible.
- Launch programs on request.
Preferably without having to jump through hoops, search for programs, remove my existing nice, ordered alphabetical, sub-categorised start menu and not try to either split everything between Apps and Programs (meaning "Microsoft Junk" and "Everything else") or it trying to treat them as absolutely identical (they are not) and then having to search through both and/or every document on the entire Internet to find what I want.
I would also quite like to be able to MOVE THE DAMN TASKBAR and customise it.
Sorry, MS, but your GUI changes over the decades I've tolerated but I've had enough now. I just want to run things, without having to specifically elevate lots of things from a right-click menu every time, and have them run and not something similarly named that you've decided will now jump to the top of my list for no reason at all (e.g. I just tried to "find" and then run CMD... and ended up in... azuredatastudio.cmd with cmd as the second option despite NEVER having selected that first one).
My next OS is going back to Linux (ran Slackware as desktop for 10 years) and that's almost entirely because of the constant nonsense UI changes that your supposed UI/UX "experts" keep enforcing. And, no, I really don't want to have to do More Options... to find Properties... to end up in a 20 year old dialog... to find the option you STILL haven't brought forward into that Settings junk but yet hide every other way to get to the only place that it exists.
I'm done with you dictating how I work, as a lifelong IT guy, programmer, system administrator, etc.
This reminds me of when Bill Gates said that everyone is going to want a computer screen on the fridge, and went on to say that it's the centre of the family, it's where everyone congregates, and the future is in interactive displays on the fridge etc etc. What a load of old bollocks! No, it's not, and it never was, except in Bill Gates' and his mates' kitchens maybe.
I can't remember when this was, maybe more than 20 years ago, but it's that attitude: we are telling you how you operate and we want to make a UI design to suit that perception, whether or not it's right.
This is what they're doing now. No thought as to whether a feature is useful or not. Just give us what YOU want MS, and we'll suck it up like mindless idiots!!
Quite.
It's very simple.
I want my computer to do what it's told.
It's a simple rule that, for the majority of my life, has held.
Now it's falling apart at a rapid pace.
I don't want all this junk. I just want you to do what I told you to do. Because you're just a tool that I use. My hammer, screwdriver, circular saw, etc. don't talk back to me. They just do what I ask them to do.
Tip 1: No, the start menu isn't my own, it's Microsoft's. They've been pushing their ever-more useless start menus onto us for well over a decade now. And it's full of pointless news articles, links to software you don't have, and isn't what users asked for, which is just small icons somewhere to click on, that we choose
Tip 2: snap layouts. Well blow me, something cheap or free software has been able to do for us for quite a while. Who cares?
Tip 3: So what? Who uses this?
Tip 4: Widgets! Everyone hates it. Why does it come up by hovering - nay passing by for a millisecond - that useless bit of weather info at the bottom? I know you can change it but it's SO annoying when you're trying to work. And it's full of clickbait headlines and adverts. Yeah, a real step forward.
Tip 5: Focus mode? No idea. Focus mode is just copying phone features
Tip 6: Windows Hello. A glorified login screen which really is annoying. It breaks, and nobody understands what those little icons are (Is that PIN? Is that Password? Why do I have a PIN?).
Tip 7: Dark mode: wow.
These marketing people are really scraping the barrel. These are not special features. These are just background things that may or may not help Microsoft. This company has never in its history employed an actual focus group - or at least that's what it looks like. They've never done research into what real people want. They only foist these "features" onto us to improve their bottom line. When was the last time that they added a feature that actually makes things easier and quicker, based on what people actually want?
And it's only going to get worse.
Actually I have seen worse, on a Sky TV box. It shows me loads of providers and programs from them all. Except it takes you half an hour to find something you can actually watch without having to take out yet another subscription. Even the live TV menu on my Phillips TV is buggy as heck, and I have to keep playing with the time sync settings to keep it working more than a couple of days.
But yes the adverts on W11 (today it was a stock ticker for some outfit I’d never heard of) are really annoying.
11 mostly keeps pushing acrobat and a subscription to adobe when i'm perfectly happy using a browser to view pdf's. pretty much disabled any messaging from anything the other day hoping that will be enough to get windows to shut up about adobe. get really tired of the "advice" windows and the applications keep offering. even get advice in outlook suggesting that a phrase needs a comma when it doesn't. Also flags words as misspelled when they aren't. just something not in the dictionary.
i strongly most of these "features", find them annoying and disable them as quickly as possible, but i have dozens of people i work with who don't even notice them, and if they do either ignore them or like them. they are probably the focus group members the ms uses.
1) Open Shell allows me to make the Start menu my own.
2) Snap layout is annoying and useless, disabled!
3) Unneeded. Easier to get a wide screen or dual monitors.
4) Never had any interest in Widgets
Focus - Unneeded! There is a three pound organ inside my skull that allows me to do this.
Windows Hello - Bought a Yubico security key which allows me to secure my system without logging into an online MS account. Help me understand how a 4 - 6 digit PIN is more secure than a 15+ character password?
Dark mode - Inconsistent implementation.
> Help me understand how a 4 - 6 digit PIN is more secure than a 15+ character password?
It is locked to your computer and your local login, by default locked to TPM as well. Cannot be moved. Reinstalling Windows kills it too since new SID/Crypto keys are generated during install. Whether that really makes it so much more secure than you long PWD is a different discussion. Not that I disagree with you here, just information. I don't like it as well, and changed my registry to NOT show Windows Hello as first option on my company laptop.
Search and find files: Open CMD.exe. Dir <drive>:\*filespec* /b /s /a
Shut down computer: Windows + R, shutdown.exe -s -f -t 0
Reboot computer: Windows + R, shutdown.exe -r -f -t 0
Hibernate/Standby: Windows + R, shutdown.exe -h (as shortcut on Desltop as well)
Connect network drive: Windows + R, net use \\server\share /user:<prefered user name>, this one saves me the 30 second wait time until it asks for user/pass.
Network panel: Windows + R, ncpa.cpl
System panel: Windows + R, sysdm.cpl
.
.
.
.
You know the drill :D....
I concur, except that for Hibernate I wrote a trivial WPF program that sits on my taskbar, and when clicked, pops up a little 5-second timer that if not cancelled, hibernates the machine. One-click, and yet with the timer, idiot-proof (important cos I are idiot).
Dear Microsoft
With all due respect, kindly take all your helpful suggestions and stuff them where the sun doesn't shine.
Recently I had to setup a VM at work for development use
1. Move start menu to the left, remove all widgets
2. make desktop background black
3. create a png the size of the screen resolution, fill with black and use as lock screen background.
4. remove suggestions and interesting facts from the lockscreen
5. turn off annoyances in Edge
6. remove search from taskbar
7. switch off visual effects
8. Use accessibility option to turn off yet more annoyances
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